I was reading David Sedaris in the New Yorker (how’s that for a snooty start to an item on a sports blog?), and he was writing about train travel a quarter-century ago and the cars in which people were allowed to smoke.

And it brought to mind a memory I thought I may already have written on, but apparently haven’t.

How it was permissible, 30 years ago, to smoke in a press box. And not only that, it was common. Unafraid. Unsympathetic.

A true story:

It was 1977, probably. Maybe a year before, maybe a year after. I was in the Dodger Stadium press box. Second row.

Next to me sat an older guy. Maybe 40 (which was old to me, at the time). I think he might still be alive, if it was the guy who I think it was. Works for a small paper.

Game is going on, early innings, and he lights up a cigar.

If you remember the Dodgers press box from 30 years ago, it was cramped. Very. Still is, actually. In the second row, the chairs practically touch each other, they’re jammed so tightly. So this guy’s cigar was burning perhaps two feet from my face.

Within seconds, I was “smoking” the cigar, too. And quite unhappy about it.

I have never been a smoker. Never thought it was cool. Or interesting. Never thought it would convey maturity or class. Never had a problem “figuring out what to do with my hands.” Neither of my parents smoked, but they didn’t make a big deal of it. I just never saw the appeal. That, and we had known since the 1960s that cigarettes could shorten your life, that they weren’t healthy, so that reinforced my disinclination to smoke, as did occasional asthma.

The thought of voluntarily compromising my respiratory system seemed the height of folly. The idea of addicting yourself to nicotine … that was a good idea, how?

I managed to grow up in an environment where tobacco smoke was pretty much absent from my life. Not in the house, not at school. Just didn’t happen. I was lucky, I guess. If I thought about tobacco users at all, I thought of them as down-market nicotine junkies. None of my friends smoked, either. I never dated a girl who smoked. I was judgmental about it. You bet.

And now this guy is smoking a cigar next to me.

I didn’t actually say anything — to confront a cigar or cigarette smoker, in 1977, was still considered provocative, even in Southern California. But I probably began fanning the air in front of me, trying to push the smoke out of my face. And this seemed to annoy the cigar-puffing idiot, which produced a sentence I never have forgotten.

He turned to me and said, “Get used to it, kid.”

The message being: If you are going to be a real sports writer you’re going to have to learn to live with second-hand smoke and not make a peep.

I was willing to take that risk, of not being a real sports journalist. I believe I got up and fought my way out of the middle of the second row of the press box till Dude was good and done with his stogie.

Turns out, he was right. At least for a time.

Lots of journalists smoked, in the 1970s and into the 1980s.  I have clear memories of infamous San Bernardino Sun prep writer Claude Anderson lighting up throughout his shift, and the cigarette dangling from his lower lip, smack in the middle of his mouth. I recall a sports editor, Fred Meier, taking huge drags on a butt and blowing clouds of smoke into the air above him before he answered questions he deemed difficult. Well into the 1980s, workers could smoke inside a newspaper office. One of my best copy editors was a chain-smoker.

And I hated it the entire time. I was more likely to hire you, actually, if you did not smoke.

(Even some elite athletes smoked, back then. Bobby Bonds (Barry’s father) had a serious smoking habit. Quite a few ballplayers did. Even some NBA and NFL guys smoked, which couldn’t possibly have helped their careers. I remember Philadelphia 76ers power forward George McGinnis sucking on a butt after a game at the Forum. Lakers center Vlade Divac smoked more than occasionally, and that was just a few years ago; his excuse is that he is from Serbia.)

So, press boxes were no better than newsrooms, and probably worse. Something about game action seemed to make writers smoke even more than they might have, otherwise.

I recall one of the big downsides to covering the Rams in the 1980s, after they moved to Anaheim. I invariably sat next to one of two veterans from the Riverside Press Enterprise who smoked constantly. Constantly. For me, it was four or five hours of hell, and going home with clothes suffused with fumes and hair that reeked of stale cigarettes.

The worst times were during the winter, at college and NFL football games, when the press box would be closed off from the elements but half the guys inside were still puffing away. It was like living in a cloud of really vile smog. I often would crack a window in front of me, if I could, even if I was in Cleveland and it was 30 degrees outside. Just to get some fresher air.

Eventually, thank goodness, it went away. I spent a chunk of the 1980s mostly working inside or covering local events, running the section, and by the time I was making regular appearances in major sports venues again, in the early 1990s, smoking had been banned. It was great.

It took only 15 years or so, but smokers went from aggressively mocking to sheepishly apologetic. As they should have been all along. Now, of course, they have to step out on balconies or in a special holding pens where they and other nicotine jones-ers furtively try to hide their addiction from passers-by. They won’t be smoking in your ballpark, or in your press box. They rarely will try, and if they do all sorts of people have no compunction about reminding them that, hey, this is a no-smoking area, dude.

So, yes, Cigar Smoking Guy: I never did “get used to it,” and in a decade or so I didn’t have to. You, sir, were the one who had to get used to polluting only the air right around your face — out of our sight.

Talk about a breath of fresh air. And anyone under 30, maybe even 35, is lucky enough not to know that the previous generation of journalists all were second-hand smokers. We just didn’t have much of a choice and were subject to scorn if we objected.

Man, am I glad those days are dead and gone.